Modern Magick

Royalty and Ruin: 6

The grounds of Ashdown Castle were beautiful, once.

Then we'd happened.

Actually, to be fair, Fenella Beaumont had happened. It was she who had enslaved several hapless Waymaster spirits and forced them to jaunt off with the castle. We'd obliged the castle's inhabitants to come back without it, Fenella included — leaving the building itself camped on the shores of Whitmore Isle on the Fifth Britain. Zareen and George were out there somewhere, too.

We would be more unpopular with Ancestria Magicka than ever, should they recover their memories of these thrilling events.

When Jay, Alban and I arrived at Ashdown we found a mess of dark, ruined earth where the castle once stood. Only a few outbuildings lingered: the stable block, and assorted others, most of them in ruins. There was no sign of Fenella, or of any of the rest of her organisation. I wondered where, in their confusion, they might have chosen to decamp to.

More unfortunately for us, we found no sign of Millie Makepeace, either.

She's hard to miss. Big, craggy and built from flint, she is a farmhouse somewhere north of two hundred years old. A bit shabby around the edges, perhaps; some of her stones are falling out, and her doors and window-frames are in need of a fresh coat of paint. She also has a habit of singing. Loudly.

But the burgeoning sunlight of early morning shone dewily down upon an empty, silent space, an occasional old oak swaying gently in the breeze.

'Setback,' I said, turning in a circle to survey the grounds in their entirety. Nothing.

'Millie!' Jay called. The word echoed hollowly over the ragged, grassy ground and no reply came.

The spirit of Mellicent Makepeace had brought the lot of us back — all of Fenella's dinner guests squashed into a house that, though large as such buildings went, could barely accommodate so many. We'd beat a hasty retreat after that, and had not stayed to see what became of the house.

'Where might a dispossessed farmhouse with homicidal tendencies go when she's tired?' I asked.

'Wherever Ancestria Magicka told her to, probably,' said Jay. 'I tried to tell her she shouldn't listen to that lot, but I don't think she was hearing me.'

I felt a moment's compunction on Millie's account. We ought to have taken better care what happened to her. Only we'd been exhausted at the time, confused and disoriented ourselves, and urgently in need of returning Home and reporting to Milady. And Millie came off as a woman/house who could take care of herself.

'Shh!' said Jay suddenly, and froze.

I waited.

'Do you hear that?'

I didn't — and then I did. A distant, thin sound, like an eerie wail. Then another.

A few seconds later, she was hitting the high notes. I winced.

'Come on.' Jay set off in the general direction of the singing. Alban and I, without looking at each other, followed.

We found Millie parked on the very edge of the Ashdown property, as though she'd been making a bid for freedom and then lacked the energy to take the final step. Huddled in the midst of a circle of ancient elms, she sat swaying slightly from side to side, her stones rumbling, and singing some wordless song of woe.

Her front door was missing, and by the looks of it, someone had taken an axe to her porch-fence and windows. Shattered glass lay everywhere.

'Millie!' hollered Jay, for the third time. 'Mellicent Makepeace!'